Preserved Wook is an oldtime New England railway engineman who calls to life again the history & technology not only of the steam locomotive in the LAST Steam Age of the Old Atlantic West, but of many a wonderful way of getting around in the World, in a better time when travel indeed was for the few…and the very few!

“In 1601, Giovanni Battista della Porta described a machine that could be used to raise a column of water with the use of steam. He described this machine in a work entitled ‘Spiritali.’ Porta’s work included a vacuum created by the condensation of steam into which water would flow. Porta’s apparatus…was called the ‘Pneumatica.’ Porta’s machine was described as being able to raise water with steam pressure. Although Porta’s machine was never applied to any practical uses, he accurately described the necessary presence of a vacuum created by steam to raise the water.”

So, who was this early-modern Giovanni Battista Porta? And was he, could he have been, a forebear of the sorcerer of the postmodern 21st century Second Steam Railroading Age, Ingeniero Livio Dante Porta? Quien sabe? As Borges points out often, there are many Argentines of Italian extraction….

Here are some links to help decide the question, starting with the brief biography on Wikipedia:

In closing, be it said that Porta’s aphoristic wit in his old age, in his ‘Mis Dificultades’ translated in Martyn Bane as “My Difficulties”, is borgesian in tone and obviates the hermetic gulf between the arts and science announced by Mr C P Snow in the 1950s and in the beginning decades of Ing Porta’s career. Snow and Porta both were devoted to the problem of meaningful knowledge, nevertheless, and perhaps the engineer after all summed up the philosopher:

“…[T]he problem is that if one hasn’t got it one doesn’t feel the lack of it.”